A survey of industry members of the Micro hydro Association (many thanks to those who responded) has confirmed that red tape is hampering development of small scale hydropower schemes and that there is overwhelming support for a simplified registration process.
However, if this is to happen, there will still need to be appropriate safeguards to avoid poorly designed (or fraudulent) installations which are the main concern of electricity, planning and environmental regulation. I have set up this discussion thread together with links to the survey summary and detailed findings (please zoom in to read the comments and summary figures in this .pdf file). I am now inviting all readers of this site to read the summary and to comment on whether the proposed registration criteria would be suitable. My aim is to provide evidence to back up a submission to Government to introduce a registration process. Please include in your comment a brief description of your role in the micro hydro world, whether as a supplier of services or products or as a potential or current generator.
12 Comments
OFGEM have published the revised Feed-in Tariff table to have effect until 31 March 2013.
DECC has dropped proposals to disallow the option for schemes between 50kW and 5MW to register under the RO. See DECC announcement.
(apologies for earlier error in upper limit) Following the response released by DECC on the FITs 2B consultation, MCS is now asking for open comments from the industry as to whether it should continue to maintain and develop its hydro product certification scheme requirements and installer standards. They have created a short online survey here: Link to survey.
Please respond individually. As a previous participant in the MCS hydro working group I shall be responding with my view that the MCS process and standards are not suitable for micro hydro schemes, whose design and implementation should be site specific, and therefore that their maintenance or development should not be continued. The EA has advised the consultees of interim arrangements and provisional revised timescales here. They expect to recommence hydropower working group meetings in 2013
You may have read or heard about an article in the Spectator magazine. entitled "Something’s fishy: Hydroelectric power is bad for the taxpayer and bad for the environment. Why does no one say so". The British Hydropower Association has written a balanced response to this article which I endorse.
Proposals for an Integrated Framework of environmental regulation (SEPA)
I have drafted a response to the consultation here. Please comment on the blog if you have any changes to suggest and please submit your own responses to SEPA directly to this email address using this form. Responses must be received by 4th August 2012 - see alo previous blog entry DECC have announced the changes from 1 October and 1 December 2012 here. I have extracted decisions relevant to micro hydro from the Government response following the consultation and added my initial comments here. Key points differing from the present arrangements are:
The EA has now confirmed how it proposes to re-activate the consultation by issuing the following to the hydropower Working Group:
"Programme
Both the BHA and the mha have expressed concern at the way flow/abstraction standards have been addressed during the consultation and have asked to meet senior EA management to discuss a satisfactory way forward. I will post developments on the mha website. As well as submitting a formal response to the consultation on 25 April, I prepared working draft proposals for ideas to improve the FiT for micro hydro schemes. I submitted these separately to DECC as the ideas could not be directly related to the consultation questions and I hoped to engage DECC in discussion. As this has not yet happened, I have now passed them through to the Minister of State in the hope that they may be looked at during rather than after this consultation.
These draft proposals contain ideas I have already discussed with a number of people in the industry and subsequently modified, but they will need further work to put into practice. This may or may not be feasible in the current FiT review, but please comment here to add to the debate which I hope will happen! |
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